What seemed on first glance a quite ordinary customer win for Ateme, at TDC-owned Danish video service provider Nuuday, was eventually appreciated by Faultline for its true beauty – which is as part of a much larger business transformation constructed around microservices. With businesses preparing to futureproof media workflows, we expect more of these types of deployments to come, and Ateme has evidently been ahead of the curve.
Some 18 months have passed since Nuuday last appeared on the Faultline radar and – to no one’s surprise – the TDC subsidiary has recruited the French encoding expert to alleviate its pandemic-fueled video overload. Nuuday’s YouSee and Blockbuster brands, boasting 1 million viewers across 100 linear channels and VoD offerings, have received the Titan technology treatment, to not only improve video quality but also prepare workflows for future trends via adoption of Ateme’s Titan File microservices application for VoD services.
Serendipitously, Faultline has published a separate piece this week on the significance of microservices for the future of media and entertainment workflows, a crystal ball worth checking out if business transformation is on your agenda. In the meantime, when prompted for some elaboration on the press release’s throwaway one-liner about its microservices for VoD, Ateme informed us the company has started the transition of its full portfolio to a microservices architecture.
Aligning with the likes of Synamedia on this front, Ateme tells us most of its products are already available as microservices, while the product in question – Titan File – has been available as microservices since the end of January 2019. Ateme has certainly kept that one quiet two years since making it available, suggesting that customers have not been as quick to adopt microservices architectures as Ateme has been, with Nuuday being one of the first deployers of Titan File as a microservice, citing elasticity as key for a file-based transcoding services.
Also adopting the popular Lego analogy (the build-your-own-burrito one isn’t as popular), Ateme says each component of the Titan software suite is built as a set of microservices running in containers either on-premise or in public clouds. This architecture frees up resources for CPU-intensive video processing tasks by optimizing density, which can only be achieved by sharing common components between applications (such as front-end, database, or monitoring).
A microservices architecture in the Ateme ecosystem also brings distributed processing across multiple nodes. For example, a file can be split into several pieces and transcoded in parallel to reduce transcoding time.
Back to the news at hand, while Ateme says its Titan Live range covers live OTT and IPTV video delivery, as well as VoD catalogs, there is no mention by name of Nordisk Film+, the joint SVoD venture launched in late 2018 between TDC’s YouSee and Danish entertainment company Nordisk Film, together with Fox Network Group. Nordisk Film+ replaced the YouBio SVoD offering which had been feeling its age since debuting in early 2013.
Last time we checked (pre-pandemic), Nordisk Film+ was a roaring success, although its absence from this week’s announcement is a little disconcerting, but just as easily could have been bundled in along with Nuuday’s YouSee brand.
Across these properties, Ateme’s Titan Live technology works together with Titan Mux for DVB-C with monitoring and control provided by the Ateme Management System Web – an open platform with industry standard APIs for controlling tasks in hardware-based or virtual environments.
Presumably, the AMSW works in conjunction with Agama’s full-coverage video assurance technology, which was deployed by Nuuday across the board for its OTT, cable and IPTV platforms in August 2019. Agama’s assurance product portfolio swears full transparency of service performance and quality of experience – saying it can do so in the head-end for service creation, across delivery networks, right through to apps and devices.
Importantly, Ateme’s Titan range puts Nuuday in line to receive access to latest technologies including HEVC, CMAF, HDR, and SMPTE 2110, the latter being a suite of standards specifying the carriage, synchronization, and description of separate elementary essence streams over IP for real-time production, playout, and other professional media applications.
Indeed, positioning itself as a company capable of future-proofing its customers’ businesses has been helped by the addition of Anevia to the Ateme arsenal, providing improvements and plugging gaps that has enabled the Titan Live portfolio to outperform other encoders in picture quality assessments.